L.A.-based artist Charles Gaines works with various mediums, including photography, drawing, text, and video, relying on existing and invented systems to generate his works. Numbers & Trees VI, Landscape, #4 (1989) is part of a body of work in which Gaines transformed photographic images within a series of prescribed operations. For Manifestos (2008), Gaines wrote musical scores based on the manifestos of four revolutionary groups, including the Black Panther Party. Comprising five musical scores, four large drawings, and a video installation, the epic work is a meditation on social idealism.

Known for her provocative combinations of text and image in her often sardonic assemblage works, L.A.-based artist Alexis Smith is an astute social critic. By juxtaposing found objects with advertising images and slogans, Smith comments on social morays, the media’s depiction of gender roles, and our increasingly consumer-focused culture. In Town & Country (2001), a card table gussied up with a scene of an English fox hunt is embellished with objects like a clock, a shaving brush, and a perfume bottle in a critique of aspirational marketing.